"Sign-Language includes the gesture-signs by which the mysteries were danced or other-

wise dramatized in Africa by the Pygmies and Bushmen. It is by means of sign-language

that the Egyptian wisdom keeps the records of the pre-

historic past. The Egyptian hieroglyphics show us the connection betwixt words and things, also betwixt sounds and words, in a very primitive range of human thought. There is no other such record known in all the world. They consist largely of human gesture-signs and the sounds first made by animals, such as "ba" for the goat, "meaou' for the cat, and "fu," for the snake. But the Kamite representation by means of sign-language had begun in inner Africa before the talking animals, birds, and reptiles had been translated into the forms of gods and goddesses by the dwellers of the valley of the Nile. The living ideographs or zootypes were primary, and can be traced to their original habitat and home, and to nowhere else upon the surface of our earth. The cow

of the waters there represented the Earth-Mother as the great bringer-forth of life be-fore she was divinized as Apt, the goddess in human guise, with the head of a hippopot-amus. The overseeing giraffe of Sut, the Hawk of Horus, the Kaf-Ape of Taht-Aan, the white vulture of Neith, the jackal of Anup, and fifty others were pre-extant as the talk-ing animals before they were delineated in semi-human guise as gods and goddesses or

elemental powers...The zootypes were extant in nature as figures ready-modeled, pic-tures ready-made, hieroglyphics and ideographs that moved about alive: pictures that

were earlier than painting, statues that preceded sculpture, living nature-types that were employed when there were no others known to art. Certain primordial types orig-inated in the old land of Africa. These were perfected in Egypt and thence dispersed around the world. Amongst them is the Earth as solid ground amidst the water of sur-rounding space, or as the bringer-forth of life, depicted as a Water-Cow; possibly the Cow of Kintu in Uganda; the Dragon of Darkness or other wide-jawed swallower of the Light that rose up from the Abvss and coiled about the Mount of Earth at night as the

Devourer; the evergreen Tree of Dawn -preeminently African- that rises on the horizon,

or upon the Mount of Earth from out the waters of Space; the opposing Elemental

Powers, beginning with the twins of Light and Darkness who fought in Earth and Heaven and the Nether World; the Great Earth-Mother of the Nature-powers; the Seven Children

of her womb, and various other types that are one in origin and worldwide in their range."